In a poll of 125 famous authors, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita was ranked the best book of the 20th century.
It’s an incredible feat considering how dark the story is: The plot revolves around a man’s obsession with a 12-year-old girl, Dolores Haze (aka Lolita), with whom he has a sexual relationship. He travels the country with her and they live together for years.
It spawned two films, both of which were critically acclaimed but highly controversial.
The story is told through the eyes of the perpetrator, Humbert. In literary critique, he’s what is called an “unreliable narrator” meaning you see the world through one biased perspective.
For example, Humbert describes Lolita as the temptress, who flirts and asks him to have sex with her. Yet months earlier, he’d kept a private diary, detailing how he longed for her touch. He even marries Lolita’s mother just to get closer to her.
What’s remarkable about Lolita is the incredible prose and evocative writing that flows through an entirely unsympathetic character.
I despised Humbert. Yet I couldn’t stop reading.
The twisted origins of this story
Few people realize there is an even more disturbing real-life case that is the inspiration for the book:
It’s the story of 11-year-old Sally Horner, who was walking into a convenience store in Camden New Jersey in 1948. She was a great kid and a rule follower with good grades. However, she’d been dared to steal a notebook by a clique of girls she’d hoped to join.
With great misfortune, a 50-year-old convicted rapist, Frank La Salle, was in the store.
Frank caught her by the arm as she tried to leave.
He said he was a member of the FBI and was required to send her to reform school. Sally began crying and panicking. Her family wasn’t well off and legal troubles would ruin them. She was afraid she’d be disowned.
Frank softened the deal, saying he wouldn’t do it so long as she did what he asked in the future.
Months later, Frank intercepted Sally on the way home from school. He told her the government wanted him to bring her to Atlantic City and that she’d be taken care of once there.
Frank had Sally tell her mom she was traveling to Atlantic City with friends. When he picked her up, he made Sally tell her mom that he was the father of one of the girls.
That night, Frank forced the 11-year-old into sex acts. And soon, they lived together. They traveled across the country. He eventually enrolled her in grammar school in Texas before they moved to California. She posed as his daughter in public but lived as his partner in private.
Neighbors said there was nothing suspicious. Frank told them his wife died in an accident. But one neighbor, Ruth, felt weird about the two and sensed something was off.
On multiple occasions, she tried to get Sally to open up but couldn’t get anything out of her. Eventually, Sally told Ruth that she’d been abducted from her family. In a panic, Ruth called the FBI, screaming into the phone about what she’d discovered.
Frank was arrested and sentenced to 35 years in prison. Sally was returned to her mother two years after her kidnapping and enrolled in school again.
How the book finds its connection
When this story broke, it was all over the news.
By chance, Vladimir Nabokov was struggling to finish an ambitious novel about a middle-aged man’s inappropriate relationship with a young girl. He read every article about Sally’s case and it became the backbone of his novel, Lolita.
Both Lolita and Sally Horner’s stories begin in the same year. Both Horner and Lolita lived with single mothers. Sally Horner’s case is even mentioned in the book version of Lolita and nobody noticed the connection.
In chapter 33, Humbert is beginning to question his conduct, and says, “Had I done to Dolly, perhaps, what Frank Lasalle, a fifty-year-old mechanic, had done to eleven-year-old Sally Horner in 1948?”
Frank pretended his wife had died in an accident. Humbert’s wife actually died in an accident (though Humbert may have been involved — she got in the accident immediately after discovering Humbert’s diary about Lolita and getting into a fight with him about it.)
Both traveled the country with their captives, who pretended to be their daughter. Both men had their lives ruined by the relationship and died in prison (Humbert was put in jail for murdering the man who stole Lolita from him).
Nabokov even had an old notecard from his archives, referencing the case: “cross-country slave”, “middle-aged morals offender,” “was branded a ‘moral leper’ by the sentencing judge.”
The sad truth of Sally’s story
What is immensely tragic: Nabokov noted how Sally was victim shamed, as women and girls often are in rape cases. Some outlets spun this ridiculous narrative “Well if she hadn’t been stealing the notebook…”
I suspect Nabokov extrapolated that insinuation into Lolita. She is depicted as this highly flirtatious and rebellious figure, seeming to seduce Humbert and lead him on, daring him to take her away from her controlling mother.
Yet this is where many critics think the book is brilliant: reality is being warped. Was the girl really begging for intimacy? Or is this the rapist mentality at work again? Is Humbert projecting her through his own perversions?
He justifies his lust for young girls because of an early experience. His one true love, a fellow 13-year-old, died of typhus, leaving him fixated on underage girls, whom he calls “nymphets”.
Of note, Humbert echoes what modern-day sex offenders say to excuse themselves: she was the initiator, I did it because of my own trauma.
Lolita eventually reverses the power, learning to manipulate Humbert into doing what she wants. She realizes he is a slave to his lust and takes advantage of it. She leaves Humbert for a playwright, leaving him emotionally broken.
Two years later, Lolita writes Humbert, but only because she is pregnant and needs money. Humbert begs her to stay with him but she quietly refuses. He gives her money and she leaves — only to die later in childbirth.
Meanwhile, Sally Horner was victimized multiple times. First by her captor, and again by society. And like the Lolita, she would die young, getting into a car wreck at the age of 15.
Nabokov’s Lolita continues literature’s long tradition of taking readers to dark places and forcing them to think about complicated subjects.
The book certainly isn’t for everyone. But when you’re reading closely, you’ll realize Lolita never loved Humbert as he says she did. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have been crying after sex or accusing him of rape later on.
In many ways, Lolita is a guide on recognizing abuse and pedophiles. Offenders are often hidden in plain sight under a charismatic guise. Pedophiles don’t just create elaborate stories to protect themselves, they do it to justify their behavior.
Sadly, and unlike Lolita, the case of Sally Horner is non-fiction and all too common.
Young girls are kidnapped and victimized by older men. It happens constantly. People never bother to ask the right questions. Those girls who do escape often aren’t believed. And many who are believed, are still blamed.
Perhaps it is good that Nabokov drew inspiration from reality. Truth carries an underlying editorial power. It forces people to think about things they prefer to sweep under the rug.